I was intrigued by the premise of this book: a world that is so overpopulated that childbirth requires a donor who is willing to give up his or her own life. In this world, a depressed woman named Mae finds herself pregnant with a child that she does not want, but that her partner, Pasha, desperately does. As they struggle to protect mother and child without costing anyone else’s life, journeys are taken, prejudices are confronted, and their perceptions of morality itself are challenged.

Despite the intriguing premise, I found it difficult to get invested in this book. The writing style threw me off—the book is full of sentence fragments that are clearly included on purpose as a writing style, but the device was overused. The characters didn’t feel multidimensional. Mae’s backstory was revealed slowly and should have made her character seem complex and nuanced, but instead she felt flat, as if her depression was all there was to her. Pasha also was one-dimensional: he was handsome, personable, unreasonably optimistic, and blindly devoted to Mae, who treated him with contempt as often as with love. Neither showed the complexity or growth I hoped to see, although there were hints toward the end that maybe some of that will happen in the second book of the series.

Overall, I really wanted to like this book, but it fell short of my hopes.

Disclosure: I was given a free advance reader copy of this book, with no obligation. The decision to leave an unbiased review was entirely my own.